Hollywood Dead: Elisabeth Hicks, Witch Detective Read online

  Back in cozy little Osceola, I grabbed a sandwich from the deli and sat down at my desk to eat while I downloaded the photos. They were all pretty useless—no proof of adultery or even another woman to be seen, but my client was paying for my time. I had to show her something.

  Giving up on the unsatisfying images, I went back to lunch. I was two bites into the wonderful mix of crisp lettuce and salty cold cuts when the phone rang. Why did people call just when I started to eat? I swallowed and grabbed the phone.

  “Stay away from Jeremy Steel.” The voice on my phone sounded raspy, deliberately tough.

  “Really? Or what?” I didn’t take well to being threatened.

  “Bad things, sister, bad things. Like your pretty friend, you two seemed cozy. Maybe you should watch what she drinks.”

  Sweat broke out on my skin—we’d all drunk from the same bottles of wine, all of us except Jo, who’d gone to the bar to get her own drink. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Shame the club’s gonna need a new singer. She was a sweet little piece of ass.” He hung up before I could scream at him. The phone went dead in my hand.

  Jo. Panic made me move like lightning, barely stopping to lock the door. I drove fast, acutely aware of every ticking minute. It was after one, nearly one thirty. If Jo was hurt, LaRue would have called me. Except he could only call if he knew. What if he had already been asleep for the day when she’d gotten home? Or if the drug or poison or whatever took some time to work?

  I got there too fast for it to be legal, not thinking straight. After miles of orange groves and coming soon signs for housing developments that would never be, the French mansion looked back at me. It had been a farmhouse once, but looking at it, you’d never know. LaRue poured money into it to make the perfect fairytale French château for his love. I hoped she didn’t die there. I yanked the door open, glad it wasn’t locked. I’d wake Jo. She’d laugh and promise to get me my own key.

  I moved through the house imagining it. Past the parlor with its floor-to-ceiling windows and the harpsichord Jo played. This room was a double of the one where Jo had realized she loved LaRue centuries ago. I took a deep breath and kept walking, my hand on the door to the basement in an instant. Normally I hesitated, scared of the den of vampires that slept below. Jo was my friend. LaRue and I did this dance of lust. But the goons he kept around, the crew he always had, scared me. Today I didn’t have time to be afraid.

  The basement was dark, but I knew my way—walk between the rows of coffins, two on either side, keep your feet on the rough cement floor and you’ll come to the door. An out-of-place outside, steel core door that stood between their bedroom and the rest of the world. I pounded on it. Nothing stirred, nothing moved. The door didn’t care how much I needed to see Jo. I took a deep breath and went to work on the locks. I’d picked these locks before—if the door was indifferent, the locks were wanton. They clicked open for me at the lightest touch, eager to give up their secrets.

  I tore into the room, letting the door slam shut behind me. My eyes adjusted to the lack of light so I could see Jo’s curls, the heavy mass of them by her head. I called her name and she didn’t respond. I screamed and she didn’t move. At the bedside, I hit the light, turning on the cute French reproduction wall sconces. The artificial yellow glow left her looking overly pale and perfectly still. I swallowed hard. Jo was always pale. I put my hands on her, searching for emotion, searching for anything as my panic grew. There was nothing there.

  “Jo!” I screamed. “Wake up!” I shook her by the shoulders. “Please wake up!” Tears started down my face but she didn’t move. “Goddamn it, Jo, you have to wake up! You’re my best friend. I’ve never had a best friend like you. You can’t be dead. Damn it, Jo wake up!”

  I was screaming and crying, grabbing her and begging at the same time but she wouldn’t move. I slumped to the floor, beside my friend’s body. Jo was dead. Really dead after decades of life, poisoned by some prick in a bar for some unknown bullshit reason. Tears went down my face and I wailed.

  “Elisabeth?” LaRue’s face looked at me over her stomach, the pale green of his eyes matching the icy green of her silk nightgown.

  “She won’t wake up.” I shook my head and cried more.

  He looked at me, then put his hands on her shoulders. There was a feeling, a crackle in the air as magic washed from him to her. With his magic, Jo stirred and whispered to him in sleepy French.

  “Jo!” I shouted, hopping up on the bed next to her. She flashed those pretty brown eyes at me, completely confused. “How do you feel? Are you all right?”

  “Elisabeth?” she asked, as if my name covered everything.

  “I thought you were dead.”

  Her hand came up and brushed my cheek, wiping away a few last tears as she shook her head.

  “You’re not though.”

  “Nope, I’m fine. Why would I be dead?”

  “The guy on the phone said he put something in your drink last night.”

  She relaxed back into her pillow. “Maybe he did, but you can’t poison a vampire.”

  “Seriously? You’re fine?” I stopped myself from laughing out loud. Instead, I looked her over for some spot or mark that would tell me she was wrong.

  “Fine.” She nodded, trying to reassure me. “Here, lie down.”

  She moved over, but the bed wasn’t that large. They slept close. The three of us in bed was a tight fit.

  “I couldn’t wake you. You didn’t have a heartbeat.”

  “Hold on.” She took a breath and then I saw it, a pulse jumping in her neck. I moved my hand to her wrist. She had a pulse for me.

  “That’s not hard is it?” Guilt hit me—for waking her, scaring her probably, and then making her do this for me.

  “Nope, I just have to think about. Are you convinced enough to tell me what’s wrong?”

  I nodded and sniffed. LaRue was watching us. I cuddled close to her, but his eyes didn’t burn with lust. For once, LaRue, the living embodiment of sex and sensuality, was free of it.

  “Tell me who threatened her.” Rage colored his words. Any man I named would be dead before the sun rose again.

  “I don’t know.” I shook my head. “I got a call telling me to stay away from Jeremy Steel. Then the guy made it sound like he’d put something in her drink.”

  “Nothing else?” LaRue’s voice was cold.

  “No, he hung up. The office line is recorded. I can check when I get back. I… I wanted to get here first just in case.”

  “I’m touched,” Jo said with a smile. Her eyes sparkled under the artificial light, filled with laughter even though somewhere some creep had tried to poison her.

  Jo didn’t think anyone at the bar would let someone slip anything into her drink. She argued that after singing there for years, she was part of the family. LaRue and I didn’t think the world was such a nice place, but then that was how all our conversations ended up. Jo was an eternal optimist who really believed the best of people. Me? I believed the worst. I stayed next to her, in her bed, my fingers on her wrist, feeling that false pulse while we talked. It was overly intimate for friends. We’d shared dreams, slippery moments when I felt her body like it was my own. We’d taken LaRue like that and been taken by him. But today, in bed with the two of them for the first time, didn’t feel sexual.

  I puzzled through my feelings on my way to the pool. It was still too early for LaRue’s boys to come listen to the tape. Too soon for LaRue himself to go break bodies over it. That gave me ample time to try to understand why I’d been so shaken. Part of it had to be LaRue’s memories, magic had let me share everything he felt as he fell in love with her more than a century ago, not to mention their erotic escapades that made me clench. It certainly hadn’t been love for him that got me so upset. My relationship with LaRue would always be defined by the line I wouldn’t cross, and the way he tried to entice me to step over it. We were strictly friends who both adored Jo in very different ways.


  At the pool my body cut the water like a knife, twisting and turning in a clean motion. Air pumped into my lungs and streamed out my nose as I swam. I was good at this, efficient in the water, a thing of beauty. I’d never have Jo’s grace on land but I could show her a thing or two in the pool. I flipped over, switching freestyle for backstroke.

  Why had I been so upset? A year ago, hell six months ago, I would have declared another dead vampire to be a good thing. Today I’d cried like a child. Jo hadn’t changed how I felt about vampires in general—they still spooked me. But Jo was different from all the others. LaRue made me think of a snake, beautiful, touchable, but oh so dangerous. I could put him in that box and move on. Douglas, my old comrade in arms, was still Douglas to me despite the way he’d been turned. I had to stop myself from opening a beer for him when he showed up. I still had to remind myself he was a vampire.

  Jo was something else. Her looks, her ethereal beauty and youth, couldn’t be anything but vampire. Yet, unlike LaRue, I didn’t think she was strong enough to take me. Not my mind, anyway. She could snap my body without even thinking, but my head was safe. She couldn’t cloud my vision or make me do things I didn’t want to do. Had that moved her from the threat category to friend or had it been something else? Maybe the way we both moved between different worlds, keeping things from our parents, made us close enough friends that I would cry over her. Maybe, I realized in the wash of chlorine-scented water, I was just growing up.

  “How was your swim?” the thug asked with a nasty voice. He and I had traded jabs a few times, but never names. He was just the guy LaRue kept around to do the dirty work. If he thought he was special because he could guess I’d been to the pool when I arrived with my hair wet and a swim bag over my shoulder, I wasn’t going to correct him.

  “Cleansing, humanizing—all sorts of things you don’t know about.” I dumped my bag inside the door by the couch, grateful I wasn’t expecting any clients to show up while he was around. “You want to hear the call?”

  “Oh desperately. I mean, since you made me obsolete and all, it’s nice to have something to do,” he drawled.

  “I made you obsolete?” I turned on the computer and clicked on the recording system. It was state-of-the-art, and while we got along, I wouldn’t say I’d mastered it just yet. There was a series of jumbled sound clips while I hunted for just the right starting point in the file.

  “My job was finding her, his Josephine, for the last hundred, hundred and ten years. Then you show up, make peace between mother and husband, and now she doesn’t run off any more. Which leaves me…”

  “Nothing,” I answered. A mean quip, came to mind but I let it go this time.

  “Exactly, nothing. I thought about seeing if Pinkertons is still in business but then I wouldn’t get to know you better, and gosh, I wouldn’t want to miss that chance.”

  I kicked myself mentally for not being mean when I could have. “What’s Pinkertons?”

  “Look it up, you’re a detective. Now, play this tape for me.”

  “It’s a .wav file. Tapes are about, oh, I don’t know, forty years out of date.” I clicked the button with my mouse. We listened once, and he gestured for me to play it again. I did not liking the panic in my voice.

  “You know I’ve always wanted to see Hollywood,” he said when the clip finished a second time.

  “You don’t say.” I did my best to sound uninterested but he went on.

  “When Cal told me—”

  “Cal?”

  “Calvin. He came out here first looking for her.”

  Calvin, the other thug. Gee, weren’t we all good friends now?

  “When he said she was here I got excited, but then no Hollywood, just some backwater town. Useless boil on the ass of civilization and now we’re stuck here.”

  “Uh, I grew up in this backwater town, you know.”

  “I rest my case.” He sighed, an unnatural sound coming from someone who didn’t need to breathe. “Anyway, this guy, he’s Hollywood, right? Real Hollywood?”

  “As real as Hollywood gets, lucky for you.”

  “Yep, real Hollywood and I get to kill him.”

  I raised my eyebrows but didn’t say anything.

  “What did you think happens to people who threaten Josephine? LaRue lives for her, something you might want to remember.”

  Maybe he thought I was falling for LaRue, or falling for Jo. I didn’t ask him what that last comment meant. I just opened the door and ushered him out of my world.

  Still a little shaken, and entirely not in the mood to work, I pulled up to Ted’s place. I was ready to tuck my car away in the garage where it wouldn’t get any small town stares when I realized I couldn’t. My normal routine was ruined by a very boring blue Taurus. I could’ve gotten in around it but I didn’t know who that car belonged to. The way things were going lately I didn’t want to find out the hard way.

  I entered through the garage door, hearing voices inside. Edward—not Ted. The voice my lover used when he did bad things. The side of him that no one in town knew about was having a carefully controlled conversation with someone I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure I should interrupt.

  A second later, the choice was made for me. Clammy skin wrapped around my arm, making my heart beat triple time. Something pulling me away from the door to the house before I could fight back.

  “Be silent,” a cold voice ordered, the whisper loud in my ear but probably inaudible to anyone else. I struggled for a second, then realized this was the mysterious William, the vampire from the couch. I stiffened, not liking having him so close. He backed off, but not enough to make me relax, so I moved closer to the door and the conversation.

  “You see, I’ve studied your file, Mr. Falconer, so I know the things you probably haven’t told anyone. I know about Alina and the things you did in Montenegro.”

  “I did what I was ordered to do. I don’t discuss it but I’m not ashamed of it. If you’re here to talk about that, let’s go ahead.” Edward was more direct than Ted. It wasn’t split personalities, just two sides of the same man. Watching him made me wonder about the things I didn’t know about him.

  “I’m not here about Montenegro, I’m here for you. We’d like you back, at least for this current crisis. Longer if you’d be willing.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Have you ever wondered about Alina, what she’s doing now?”

  “No.” Edward shook his head with deliberate side-to-side motions.

  “She had your child.” The interviewer’s face was away from me, but I suspected this tidbit came with a smile.

  “I appreciate the attempt but that one won’t work on me. Try another lie.”

  “How can you be so sure I’m lying? You were with her for months.”

  Edward stayed silent.

  “Condoms fail, Mr. Falconer.”

  “We’re not discussing my sex life any longer. Try a new tactic. Maybe the truth?”

  There was a pause, a space of five or six heartbeats while the two men looked at each other.

  “Fine. Your team was dispersed after magical activity, spellwork. Prior to that, you were working with another team—”

  “No,” Edward corrected flatly. “We were stationed in the same location as another team. Teams don’t work together, but then you know that. Why are you treating me like a subject?”

  “Some of the members of that team have been found dead after several hours of torture.” It was the big reveal, the phrase that should have made Edward panic with his heart in his throat. Mine was.

  “Interrogation or maybe treatment. We don’t use the word torture.”

  “Goddamn it, don’t you quote regulations at me. Look!” Angry, the man spilled photos all over the dining room table. The glare from the window stopped me from seeing what they looked like but whatever was on them didn’t affect Edward. He picked one up, then another, stacking the photos as he went, finally reaching for the envelope they’d come from and putting them back. />
  “They neglected to tourniquet the leg wound, failed to keep the knife hot enough to cauterize. It’s sloppy work.”

  “That’s because he’s insane! This psycho is coming for you!” The other man was half-standing, pounding on the table. “We need you back in the fold where we can keep you safe. Look at the photos. Is that how you want to end up?”

  “Pain only hurts if you let it.” Edward stopped, taking a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. You wouldn’t understand. The pictures scare you. You expect me to feel the same fear. I don’t. I’m not coming back. If that’s all you have to say, this conversation is over.”

  “Your team became a supernatural liability, but you didn’t. You were good and you didn’t lose it the way they did. You can’t be happy with the bullshit life you’re hiding behind. And I can introduce you to your son. Don’t you want to know your child?”

  “Someday, when I have one.” Edward’s eyes didn’t show me anything and I knew him better than the man across the table. “This conversation is over.”

  Edward stood, and the man did the same. “If you insist.” He waited for a second, maybe hoping Edward would give him an opening, but nothing came. “Keep the photos. Think about it. OPS is here for you, Edward. You’re part of our family—we want to keep you safe.”

  Edward walked out of my vision. I heard the door open and the man came into view. He was nondescript, dark tan skin, black hair, black suit. Edward shut the door behind him, then calmly shut the blinds in the dining room.

  “That should be enough,” he said to the empty room.

  “More than enough,” the vampire beside me replied, opening the door. “You have a guest.”

  “Hey,” Edward’s voice still, not Ted’s. He was on edge but the smile he gave me touched his eyes. I counted that as a win and didn’t push it by trying to kiss him in front of William.

  “Hey back. Care to talk about all that?”